


Red ribbon

by letosatie



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Depression, Gen, Mind/Mood Altering Substances, Substance Abuse, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-03 23:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2892587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letosatie/pseuds/letosatie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the week before Christmas, an extra drink or two is accepted and expected.  Charles finds it all a bit overwhelming.</p><p>Originally written in response to Red's secret mutant prompt pointing out the spike in substance abuse around the holidays and wondering how Charles would cope, but it wasn't done in time for madness because blahblah hospital stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red ribbon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Red](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/gifts).



Charles and Raven were laughing. Raven had her head tipped back, her hand gripping Charles’ shoulder. Her cheeks were pink, high on the cheekbones, and Charles was sure it was the brandy they’d been drinking combined with the teasing he’d just subjected her to. He’d just whispered in her ear that she looked ravishing and that the blond Oxford Alum seemed to sincerely appreciate her Ferguson tartan skirt which was green and white and red and festive and short, so very short. The Marcels were singing Blue Moon and Charles sang along twisting the words, telling Raven ‘you are my blue moon, before you I was alone, I will always adore you’ and, he pulled her blonde curl out, ‘when I looked the moon had turned gold’. The surrounding men and women were laughing and forgiving. There was a string of popcorn around her neck like a scarf, with great gaps in the line-up where she’d been impatiently nibbling, and Charles remembered showing her how to push the thread through the kernels, guiding her chubby, uncoordinated six year old fingers because she’d never had a Christmas before. She’d never had Christmas before and he showed her all the things he loved about it: from the tree, to cutting out cookies, to singing carols off key. He showed her all the things he loved about Christmas and they did them together every year, until… she was gone.

Charles put the photo down. There was a rip at the top just above one of the peaks of Charles’ paper crown where he’d almost ripped it up one Christmas in the late 60’s. Thank god he’d stopped himself. His beautiful sister should be intact, intact and safely secured in place by the little paper corner holders and protected by tissue paper, eternal on the pages of the album. 

Charles leaned over and grabbed a bottle, gulped enough to burn and then splashed an uncouth amount into his tumbler. He spilt some. It splattered on his robe and his goose pimpled chest. He waved his hand over it, but it didn’t magically dry, so he wiped at his chest with the robe. What the hell, right? Who was here to witness? He looked around the room but there was only the guitar moaning from stereo and the logs cracking in the open fire.

He straightened his leg to stretch and fell to assessing its shape. Built like a brick shit house, Charles was. Been ages since he boxed or ran or pushed that cumbersome chair around, and yet that leg was still hard like Erik’s eyes when he left the beach. 

And look at that nipple, taut in the December temperature, despite the raving fire in the hearth. It lifted the delicate material of his robe in its bid for attention and Charles poked it lazily, as a child pokes a beetle he discovers under a rock. It remained stubbornly pert. 

Erik’s nipples were always ironically hard. On a body that was all twisted rope and extended lines, long drawn out riptides to rosy horizons, they stood out brazenly, immediately perpendicular, when Charles touched him. Charles’ cock began to push against his Y-fronts, for the accuracy with which Charles remembered every hard-won inch of that intense body and the immediate reaction those memories still provoked in his own body regardless of years of absence, Erik might as well bloody be there. 

Look at that bit of fun, Charles thought, pulling his waistband up to look his penis in the eye. Didn’t do that for a few years. And yet, what fucking good is it? No good for fucking. Never fucking again. Not fucking ever again. Not ever again. Charles tucked his cock away as firmly as he’d tucked his heart away, somewhere no one could see it, and Charles had determinedly forgotten how to find it again.

This whiskey was awful, not enough peat and too short in the barrel. It was an insult to the Waterford crystal it was presently swilling around in. But what the hell, right? What the hell did it matter anyway? This glass wasn’t a reward for studying hard, for taking in a new lost mutant, for surviving a day in Korea. This glass was to follow the other five, to precede the next three, to wash the bitterness off his tongue so it wouldn’t come out as raging vituperation when he opened his mouth, to buffer between the miasma of loss and the still oozing gap in his chest so it wouldn’t fester. This glass was for survival; it didn’t have to be art.

His skin was tingling. He had no idea what day it was. There were no thoughts beyond the honest voice of Neil Young. Charles sang along, “I’ve been in my mind, it’s such a fine line…”

Hank was banging at the door. “Charles, can I come in?”

“I’m not decent, Hank.” His head rolled back to the yellowing ceiling.

“Professor! Charles, it’s too cold to be undressed. At least let me check the fire.” 

“It’s fine, roaring, in fact. Thank you, Hank, but I’m fine.”

Silence. Not the silence of absence, of stifled words. 

“Okay,” Hank said finally. There was a rustle and heavy receding steps.

Charles waited and then checked what Hank had left outside the door. It was a wrapped box; white paper, red ribbon. 

Charles set his jaw and his breath steamed out of his nostrils with a sting. Raven had always had red ribbon on her presents. The pile of gifts, carefully chosen and wrapped by the housekeeper, had been invariably coded with green ribbon for Cain, white for Charles and red for Raven.

Charles left the box where it was.

He drank faster, chasing numb.

When he woke up, he was tucked into his own bed, a punitive beam of sunlight stabbing through a gap in the curtains and piercing his blissful dark. His stomach roiled against being conscious just as his thoughts recoiled from being alive, and he leaned over the side of the bed to where Hank had left him a pail and vomited, raw and sweaty.

God, he felt bad, not even for the vomit drying on his chin, but the terrifying awareness of this being who he was now. Someone who had been smart and loved, if briefly. Someone who had been making a difference. He was none of those things now; nothing. Charles didn’t want to be this person. Pointless to be anything if he couldn’t be his old self. It was a terrifying relief, the thought of not being. Perhaps only Hank would notice he was gone and surely Hank’s life would be better without Charles as his burden. 

A filament of thought wormed into his morass. Would Raven would cry at his funeral? 

And then he despaired because he knew he couldn’t leave in case she came back but he didn’t know how to keep going without her.

Quick as a bullet, Charles became angry at the war and at Raven and Erik and all the people that left and all the voices that flooded his head when the stop-gap of the serum wore off. How dare they need him? Why should he care? Charles was a person who was abandoned, he had nothing to give to someone who needs. 

Charles’ eyes were hot and the front of his forehead felt weighted. He got up quickly and stalked around the house looking for Hank. 

He was in the library, re-reading Smith, Kelly and Wilcox, and looked up with oppressive hope at Charles’ entry. Charles flopped down on the sofa next to him and said, “Will you read it out loud?” Hank gave a pleased, little half smile and dipped his head towards the journal. He started speaking and Charles thought about restriction enzymes, a flimsy levee against the persuasive fears battering at Charles’ purpose, but temporarily effective. 

They spent the day there until Charles’ head fell onto the back of the sofa and his eyes slid shut. 

The next day, accompanied by remorse, he took a car into the town centre to shop for something for Hank. He started out jaunty, but his steps slowed and grew rooted in the pavement as he passed the ice cream parlor that Raven loved, the movie theatre where they’d attended the matinee most Saturdays, the dress shop where Charles had bought Raven her prom dress, sat on the uncomfortable chair while his baby sister twirled and posed, trying to explain away how grown up she appeared. Dresses and make-up could add years on the fairer sex. 

And his temples squeezed in strictly as he passed the book shop where he’d caught Erik having purchased Charles’ published works, the restaurant where they’d eaten alone together for the first time since the road trip, and the fountain where Erik had tossed in a penny and wished he could have something as good as Charles. Charles had said, yes, unequivocally, he would be had. But he’d not been good enough, it seemed, to be treasured for long.

The only place Charles thought looked remotely safe was the bar, so he sat in a booth, in the dusty, dim drinking hole, and drank until there was only the condensation on the glass and the back ground hum from other patrons and the pink lips of the cocktail waitress and the puzzle of how to stand upright. At some point Hank came to get him. Charles reprimanded him for being too tall to lean on.

After a long, restless sleep, Charles was in the study listening to music and trying to read. The phrases in the text kept becoming disconnected to what Charles was hearing in his head. He persevered a bit longer with his attempt at reading, then threw the book at the shelf and it bounced off, landing open and crumpled on the Aubusson. 

Charles rummaged in a box on his desk and produced a vial. He sloshed whiskey in his tumbler and spiked it with LSD. Then he turned up the music and stared into the recesses of the ceiling, swaying slightly in time to Baba O’Riley. 

Eventually, his muscles started to give and he lay on the rug. Charles spread his palm out on the rug and pressed his finger pads into the pile. He rolled over and the carpet scratched his cheek like Erik’s five o’clock shadow. He groaned with the memory, which braided itself into Charles’ reality and his current, colourful perception. 

There was no passage of time, no temperature, no light and dark; just wool fibres coaxing his skin to life and Erik underneath him, firm and receptive, as real as a rainbow.

The pattern in the rug mutated and moved, slithering towards Charles, who jumped and rolled away. There was dread in his spine and he scrambled, half crawling, to the safety of the thin border of tongue-and-groove floorboards around the undulating rug. He found himself leaning against a window and the pane was disturbingly cold. He turned to it. His reflection was even more shocking, the freckles on his nose sinking into the pink of his lips and a days worth of stubble dripping off his chin. Horrified, he placed his hands on his cheeks to press his face back onto his skull, but it oozed through the gaps in his fingers. He didn’t even realise he was screaming until Hank ran in and slapped him. 

“Come on, Charles,” said Hank, and walked him around the foyer and listened to him babbling about anything that wasn’t his face, or the carpet, or his lost little blue girl.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Hank asked him, when he had become calm and focused, curled on a kitchen chair drinking juice. “Do you want to talk about… her?”

“No Hank, no, I won’t do that to you.”

“Regardless, Charles,” said Hank, fidgeting on his chair, “I think you need to let it out somehow and I… I can listen if that helps you.”

“Thank you, Hank, but I really am fine,” Charles insisted, before he said goodnight and went to bed.

The next day, Charles wrote them Christmas cards, all of them, all the people he could no longer reach. There was one for his mother and father and step father and step brother and the housekeeper and Moira and Alex and Sean and Darwin and his lovely, special sister, who was his own personal soundtrack of laughter, and Erik, who didn’t even celebrate Christmas. He wrote them carefully and fanned them until they dried. His finger had a bold, blue stain on the knuckle. Then he placed them in a paisley box with years of birthday cards and Christmas cards and ‘I don’t understand Hanukkah but I bloody love you’ cards. Then he curled around the box until he slept in the chair at his desk, sitting up. It was so comfortable; there was no pain. 

On Christmas Eve morning, Charles telephoned the green grocer and waited for the delivery boy while glaring at the whiskey bottle on his desk. “Fuck off,” he told it. The whiskey looked elegant; the lamp behind it was making it glow, the ring at the surface and the circumference of the liquid shaped like a halo. 

“I’m not going to drink you,” Charles told it. He flicked open a newspaper, managed a few lines before his eyes flicked back to the Lagavulin 16 year. “That’s it, you’re going in the cabinet, you siren.”

He picked up the bottle, intention true and fully formed, to lock it away and get through the day without it. God, the glass felt good in his hand, Charles’ thumb had pushed up the cork before his brain caught up with the action. The smoky peat scented the air, beguiling, promising. Whiskey hadn’t broken a promise yet.

Charles tilted his chin up and swallowed from the rim of the bottle. He didn’t remember anything in between that gulp and Hank bringing him a pot of tea and a sandwich in the afternoon. 

Charles ate obediently without once meeting Hank’s eyes and Hank, once he had ascertained Charles was at least sparsely nourished, left. It was hard to remember that Charles was his responsibility but not his fault. 

On Christmas Day, Hank ate breakfast and telephoned his family. He opened the presents they had posted him while they passed him from Mom to Dad to Aunt June. When he rang off, he went to check on Charles. He was not in his bedroom, not for a while by the crisp temperature circulating with the stale warmth via the open window. He wasn’t in the study but the white and red wrapped box, which had been sitting on the hall carpet for six days, was now open on the desk. By the time Hank found Charles, he was in the kitchen with his brow furrowed. His hair was a rat’s nest and his undershirt stank quite tartly. 

But Hank didn’t seem to mind. In fact Hank’s face was light and his glasses were misty when he discovered Charles fussing over a sticky, glazed ham, some vegetables and a steaming pudding. Charles looked up at him, his blue eyes shiny with shame, and Hank smiled in face of the staggering soberness of his mentor.

“Merry Christmas, Hank,” said Charles, offering his hand.

“Merry Christmas, Professor,” Hank returned, taking the hand and the reprieve for what it was.


End file.
